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HCCC298/2009
IN THE HIGH COURT OF THE
HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION
COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE
CRIMINAL CASE NO. 298 OF 2009
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HKSAR |
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Yang Wan Hong, Dannis |
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Date:
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1 February 2010 at 10.04 am
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Present:
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Mr Ira Lui, Senior Public Prosecutor of the Department of Justice, for HKSAR
Mr Andrew Humphrey Bullett, instructed by Messrs Christine M Koo & Ip, assigned by the Director of Legal Aid, for the Accused
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Transcript of the Audio Recording
of the Sentence in the above Case
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COURT: I have to sentence you on your plea of guilty for an offence of robbery.
You are now a 40-year-old man with a clear criminal record. You had a good character before this. You have never been in any trouble of any sort, and lived an honest and industrious life.
The economic downturn took away your business; you split up with your long-term girlfriend; your mother was injured; and by the middle of last year, you found yourself at the end of your tether. The picture painted attractively by your counsel in mitigation is one I accept, and it is against that background that you committed the grave crime of robbery.
You came to Admiralty because you thought you would bump into someone there worth robbing. In fact, you came across a lady carrying over $100,000, but I will accept that was chance. This is not a case where you had identified someone leaving a business carrying cash. I will act on the basis of what you told the police, that you decided to rob her because you could see a $1,000 note through the plastic folder.
I will also accept that you had decided to carry a toy pistol and not a knife or a bladed weapon because you thought that the former carried less risk of injury both to yourself and any victim. The toy pistol you carried did not have sufficient muzzle velocity, although it could discharge a plastic pellet, to fall within the definition of “arms”.
I can appreciate how, as a layman, you may have thought that carrying the toy was a less grave crime than the display of a bladed weapon in a robbery, but the fact is that the abhorrence with which these courts view anything to do with arms in a robbery makes that judgment you made an unsound one, for there is no doubt about it; looking at other cases similar to yours, the fact is that carrying an imitation firearm, a toy like this, in a robbery attracts a higher starting point than does the display of a bladed weapon.
I suspect that many of the cases where the higher starting point in relation to a toy weapon being carried are instances where the robbery that was in fact carried out was more sophisticated and more planned than the undertaking that you were involved in. I will also bear in mind that on the facts, this was not a case where you approached a woman, in effect, with a pistol, as far as she was concerned, in her face. She was not aware of the presence of the toy gun until the struggle took place.
What I will do in the circumstances, in trying to work out the right sentence for you, is I shall not look at the starting point of 9 years which the run of the mill robbery like this may attract. I shall reduce that in my mind down to 8. That would, after your third discount for your plea of guilty, give a sentence of 5 years and 4 months. These matters are not just entirely mathematical. Cases have feel to them, and in your case, the feel that I have from the opening, the papers and the mitigation that I have heard is in fact that you were an otherwise decent man acting in a desperate situation, and what is said in the letters that I have read about you is true.
So what I shall do is discount your sentence the further to reflect that part of the mitigation, and I find myself debating, in effect, between 4½ years and 5 years. In the particular facts of your case, I judge I can take the lower figure.
That is a lenient sentence for the crime you committed. It is designed to be, and I hope it concentrates on judging your particular case on your particular facts, even though the actual sentence I pass is, on the face of it, a lenient one for a crime that bears the label yours does.
The sentence I pass upon you therefore is one of 4½ years’ imprisonment. You could have hoped for nothing less, and it is still more, probably, than you would have received had you displayed a knife to the lady.
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